Frankfurt to pinch London’s crown as Europe’s data centre king

The future is certainly looking rosy for the data centre market in not just the common cities like London and Frankfurt, but the whole of Europe.

Real estate specialist CBRE recently released research that reveals the amount of data IoT devices are generating is doubling every 40 weeks, which is obviously having a significant impact on data centre activity in Europe.

"Society's reliance on digital devices and cloud services - and consequent need for data storage and processing - will only increase as the world gets smarter and more connected,” the report suggests.

Cities in Europe are already benefitting from the data centre boom with Paris, Dublin, and Amsterdam having already established data centre clusters, and other countries like Latvia, Lithuania and Denmark nipping on their heels.

However, at the top of the chain is London and it has been this way for some time, but this is soon to change according to the Europe Data Centre Trends Tracker 2018. The report predicts Frankfurt to overtake Greater London to host the largest data centre cluster by early next year.

This year total Frankfurt area data centre space is forecast to surge by more than 34,000 square metres of raised floor space, roughly 60 MW of data centre customer power (DCCP). This growth is being driven by 11 data centre expansions by providers such as Colt Telecom, Digital Realty, Equinix, Interxion and Maincube. One striking investment made this year came from Zenium which has pans to open a 27,500 square metre data centre in the city.

There are a number of reasons for Frankfurt’s meteoric rise, including its attractive location in the heart of both Germany and continental Europe, its base as an international connectivity hub, its abundance of space for data centres to build and expand, and finally, unlike London it isn’t engulfed in political uncertainty.

Last week Etix Everywhere announced plans to open a €120 million data centre campus just outside of Auckland.

"This data centre will offer unique expansion capabilities at only a few hundred metres from the main IT hub of Frankfurt," says Etix Everywhere Germany MD Marc Fröse.

"Our clients will benefit from an ideal location with excellent connectivity."

Viderium is looking to expand in Europe for a number of reasons.

"Europe offers favourable energy costs, as well as the long-term stability provided by a connected European market," explains Viderium CEO Ross Archer.

"This grants our business enhanced profitability in the short-term paired with a more predictable longer term outlook."